Benjamin Formanek

The project of this paper is to rebut John Turri’s arguments against Thomas Reid’s thesis concerning the priority of natural language. Human language, as Reid professes, is chiefly aimed at the communication of ones thoughts, purposes, intentions, and desires, whereby communication is accomplished through signs. For Reid, signs are either natural or artificial, and by extension, language is also either natural or artificial. While artificial language has no meaning absent some settled upon compact or agreement, every person knows, by their own nature — and prior to any compact or agreement, the meaning of natural language. Equipped with this distinction, Reid argues that natural language is a prior and necessary condition for the invention of artificial language. In his paper “Reid on the Priority of Natural Language,” Turri objects to Reid’s priority thesis on three distinct, but interwoven points. Firstly, he contends that Reid is not concerned with the interpersonal use of artificial language and its dependence upon natural language. Taking the previous conclusion in hand, he argues that natural language is likewise unnecessary for merely inventing artificial language. Thirdly, Turri argues that even if we were to hypothetically grant that Reid was concerned with the interpersonal use of natural language in his priority thesis, Reid has not sufficiently established that its successful employment also depends upon natural language antecedently. The success of Turri’s arguments would implicate the cohesion in Reid’s heterodoxical shift from his contemporaries concerning perception, epistemology, and linguistics. My contention with Turri takes root in my aim to preserve Reid’s priority of natural language for the sake of the cohesion, and therefore the heterodox novelty in Reid’s work. For Reid, we must each enjoy some mode of understanding each other for it to be possible to meaningfully communicate. The means by which we have the aforementioned access to others’ thoughts, purposes, intentions, and desires owes to natural language — that which, allegedly, each person has the capacity to recognize by our own nature. It is precisely because we successfully employ language to communicate that we can recognize that we have such access. We can see then that our capacity to have knowledge of one another is implicated, foundationally, by natural language. Herein my first objection to Turri takes shape. In order to have knowledge of one another, indeed, to carry out our aims with one another, depends essentially on the interpersonal use of language; if Reid were only concerned with the invention of artificial language’s antecedent dependence on natural language, he would not have iterated that the purpose of language is to communicate, whereby successful communication entails successfully using language. As I will argue, Turri is not careful enough with these passages. To Turri’s second objection, I argue that for Reid, the capacity to merely ‘invent’ artificial language individualistically (that is, to coin a phrase one’s self without employing is interpersonally) is entirely beside the point, and entirely futile. When Reid speaks of our capacity to invent artificial language, he implies our usage; for simply coining a word, and uttering it in circumstances under which the hearer has no basis for understanding its signification serves no efficacious communicative purpose. Concerning his third objection, the example that Turri provides to undermine Reid’s priority thesis can be met with satisfactory retort once we consider the various ways in which natural language, and natural signs more generally, underscore our capacity to understand one another prior to compact or agreement about artificial language. In Turri’s example, he suggests that onomatopoeia (a person howling “owoo” like a Wolf), as an artificial bit of language, can be successfully employed and understood interpersonally without prior compact or agreement between the speaker and hearer. I argue that the success of Turri’s counterexample is entirely contingent upon characterizing onomatopoeia as artificial language. As such, I aim to show two things. Firstly, we ought instead understand onomatopoeia as an instance of a Reidian first class natural sign. Secondly, the hearer’s capacity to successfully understand the speaker in the example depends upon both this aforementioned type of natural sign, as well as other relevant features of the speaker’s outward demeanor, which ought be understood as sorts of natural language.